Project description
Exploring collective bargaining dynamics to bridge the gender pay gap
Globally, women earn, on average, 20 % less than men, a disparity that persists even in Europe, where women earn 13 % less despite commitments to eliminate the gender pay gap. Countries with significant gender pay gaps have employed collective bargaining to raise wage floors in feminised sectors, yet challenges remain. With this in mind, the ERC-funded WAGE project aims to explore the gendered dynamics of collective bargaining by examining historical, contemporary and possible future practices in Germany, Norway and Sweden. Focusing on the metal and nursing sectors, WAGE will analyse collective bargaining processes and their impact on wage disparities, using qualitative research methods to pave the way for greater gender equity in the workplace.
Objective
All over the globe, women in the work world receive, on average, 20% less than their male counterparts (United Nations, 2022). In countries explicitly committed to eliminating the gender pay gap (GPG), such as those in Europe, women still earn, on average, 13% less than men do (Eurostat, 2022). This is regardless of the fact that countries with persistent GPGs have deployed a strategic institutional measure to raise the wage floor of feminised work sectors and reduce the GPG – namely, collective bargaining.
The overall aim of WAGE is to theorise the gendered nature of collective bargaining by investigating the past, the unruly present and the possible future of regulated collective bargaining processes in three key countries: Germany, Norway and Sweden. Moreover, the project’s research design will involve gathering data at the sectoral level of the metal sector and nursing and will use ethnographic research methods. To realise its overall aim, WAGE will accomplish the following three research objectives:
1. Compare and synthesise existing histories of collective bargaining and the GPG in the three selected countries.
2. Uncover and analyse daily practices in collective bargaining rounds that result in wage increases in the male dominated metal sector and the female dominated nursing sector.
3. Document and explain how actors embedded in the male dominated metal and the female dominated nursing sector relate to the wage norm and sectoral gendered wage differentials.
Given the dearth of scholarship on the relationship between gendered wage differentials and collective bargaining processes from an inter-sectoral angle, this study will be the first to systematically use qualitative methods to explore the economic frontier between sectoral gendered wage differentials and collective wage formation, thereby contributing to the effort to achieve gender equity in practice.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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0313 Oslo
Norway
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